Or hell, here's a thought, they release a mouse and keyboard on consoles and we no longer have to keep dumbing these games down for anyone.

Mouse & Keyboard is not some magical, all-powerful control combination for every game out there. Some games are downright painful to play without analog sticks and many developers get lazy when they don't have to be frugal with their controls.

EA ranks their employees in a stack. The different project and team managers fight over where their employees end up in that stack. The ones on the top get promotions...the ones on the bottom get laid off.

Anyone going to work for EA should definitely treat it as a temporary gig, but this is not business as usual for most developers. Most try to avoid lay-offs whenever possible...for EA, it's a seasonal event.

Slashman wrote on Oct 29, 2010, 19:04:Player made content is NOT the future of MMOS for several reasons.

First and foremost, players will have no ability to create or import their assets into the game for use in their mods.

Why not? They could. Other games do and I promise you there's nothing different about building an asset for an MMO than a typcial shooter with robust mod community.

Secondly, players will have no freedom to alter game mechanics or introduce new ones that the developers have not done themselves.

Again, why not?

Third, as proven by City of Heroes' experiment with this, people like dev created content more than player created content exactly for the first 2 reasons listed above.

First, I disagree with this. There were a number of player created missions in MA that were better than many of the dev-created missions...particularly when they added teh ability to create the costumes for enemies in those missions. A lot of the dev-created content just recylces the same powers and maps that are available to players, but some of the players are very creative about the setting, enemies, dialogue, and story text that presents the same-old-same-old in an interesting new way.

Couple that with a modable game, and you could easily have community created content as good or better than 'official' content.

Player created content in an MMO can never do anything to surprise the player apart from what story it tells. I'll never walk into a COX AE mission and encounter powers I've never seen before. I'll never encounter ways to interact with the environment that I've never seen before. That is why player made content will never rise to anything more than a small niche in MMOs.

For some players, story alone is enough.

I have walked into MA missions with custome enemeis that represented something I hadn't seen anywhere else in the entirety of the game.

Again, allow modability and all bets are off.

I guarantee some smart developer with trusting financial backing will find a way to monetize a mod community for their MMO and make a mint. No subscription, possibly even give the game itself away for free, and still make a fortune on micro-transactions, advertising, services, and taking a percentage from community created content.

This kind of system makes so much more sense in the Star Trek universe (hello holo-decks) than it did in City of Heroes.

I too believe the future of MMOs is free-to-play model with support for community/player created content. Without the subs, developers won't be so damn paranoid about keeping their players playing and will be less restrictive about what players choose to do in their game.

The days of MMO developers triple-dipping the customer's wallet with retail, subscription, and micro-transactions are at an end

I don't know how to feel about Civ V. On the one hand, I rarely get a real urge to play (I'm more compelled to fire up Minecraft these days), but on the other hand, when I do play Civ V, it's never anythign less than a 6 hour marathon that I can't tear myself away from.

I'm glad their hyping this game, otherwise no one will have heard of it when it's finally released.

At this point, I'm suspecting that DNF has turned into a practical joke for Developers. 4 years from now, when it still hasn't been released...id will pick it up...another 4 years and then Epic will pick it up and hype it for a while. On and on, until the sun finally devours the Earth.

And ultimately, we'll probably end up with a mediocre game...further cementing that MMOs are expensive to develop and unlikely to be successful...leading to even less of a chance of seeing really good MMOs being developed.

Honestly, MMO in a post-apocalyptic wasteland just seems doomed from the get go. It's a much better setting for a single-player or perhaps small co-op game. The lifeblood of an MMO is its community. You can't put hundreds or thousands of people into the same playspace, expect them to form social bonds, friendships, rivalries...but still feel like it's a wastland where resources are scarce, survival is harsh, and every man is out for himself.

For every 100 startups, one of them gets it right and creates something astounding. They have just as good a chance of doing it as anyone else and I wish them the best of luck. We need new ideas in an industry that's growing stale and conservative...following trends instead of venturing out into new territory...playing follow the leader with whatever's making money that year.

Let's hope the live up to their name and do something big and bold, even if it sucks.

So if Bioware is spending that much money, I'd say they've earned that right. You know, on account of them actually making games that are pretty damn awesome and sell really well.

I'd say that 300 million is a fuckton of money, but didn't a dev say a few years back that if anyone wanted to compete with WoW, they had to spend like a billion dollars to do so, just because WoW is so massive and so smoothly polished? It's not fair to have to go up against a MMORPG that's been refined for six years, but that IS the reality of the market place. Players expect a certain level of polish, and if your new MMORPG doesn't deliver that, they'll just keep playing WoW.

So if Bioware wants KOR to be succesful, it seems fairly logical that they're spending a load of money. (I still think 300 million is too much to spend on a game, but whatever. I understand the thought process behind it.)

Bioware is not a singular entity. This team in Austin is pretty new, and this would be their first MMO. EA slapping the Bioware label on them is accomplishing exactly what they want it to, people thinking that this will be an MMO by the same guys who made Mass Effect, Jade Empire, and Baldur's Gate. Even if it were the same team, past success does not guarantee success, all it guarantees is that they can probably get the funding they thing they need. Teams change over time, they grow, they shrink, people move on, people get fired...you never know when that one person gets pulled out of the mix and changes the chemistry for the whole team.

$300 million is an insane amount of money though. Of course they're free to spend it, but for that price tag the expectations for success are going to be extremely high. That means that even if the game launches and immediately draws in half a million subscribers, it may not be enough to keep it running. That's an important consideration for anyone thinking about investing $60 + $15/mo to play a game that may not be around for more than a few months.

This very much has the ring of truth to it, especially as I've just been layed off myself from a company who had recently brought in someone from Mythic to oversee our project, and I was seeing many of the same things myself.

It's a shame, but most game development studios are not run by people who actually like games. They're business-men who see games as a great way to make money for themselves.

I wanted to buy Singularity but they decided not to release it on Steam here in the UK. And Wolfenstein didn't appear to a while after release and hasn't been discounted, so I skipped that as well. Two games I wanted but that their terrible business practices prevented me from buying.

You're an ass.

Not going to bother explaining why, because if you don't already know, you'll never get it.

tis the season for layoffs to re-align company focuses. Is it end of the business year or something?

Best wishes and condolences go out to all of the people at Raven affected by these layoffs. Things don't bode well for the future of that company from the sound of things. So odd, because Gamasutra has listed openings there for the past couple of weeks. Maybe their budgets fell through?

Hey Randy, how about giving those who pre-ordered from places that can't or won't still honor those arrangements some kind of game schwag or discount. Pre-orderd from Babbages, here's a $5 coupon for DNF. Hell, throw a Borderlands DLC to them. Make them feel good and get them to pick up a copy of that game to use it.

People pirate this shit all the time. Data is free, but it has value. It would cost you nothing to give someone a code for DLC, or access to some of that exclusive content you get for buying a game from Gamestop or Target I'm sure you're already planning to do. If that translates into a happy customer who's giving you money for your game...how is that not a win-win?

Chris Bruce, honestly, was a decent guy at one time, but the last time I saw him, was nothing but a Grade-A jackass, barely talking with anyone, sitting with that smug look on his face. Hope they erase Back Alley Brawler, Marauder, and Praetor White from the game permanently, I'd just as soon forget him.

I want this game to do well only because I like the idea of a 'super-hero' MMO, and if this one tanks as bad as Champions Online did the chances of anyone being able to get the funding to make a really good one is practically nill.

I have many fond memories of the first Wing Commander game, including monkeying around with our system's batch files so that it could be booted in the very particular way it needed to be to allow the game to use expanded rather then extended memory.

“Ignoring your community in terms of suggestions to improve the game is one of the biggest mistakes a company can do while running an online game.”

Wrong. Not knowing what your game is, what makes it good, and what makes it bad is the biggest mistake you can make while running an online game. For every suggestion made by someone in the community there will be one in complete opposition and one demanding that nothing change at all. Trying to appease your schizophrenic community without any clear idea of what your game is will be falling into the same trap that lead to the tragic end of a man, a boy, and their donkey. If players really knew what makes a game good then they'd be making games...but players only think they know what they want to improve their own personal experience, and that does not translate to a successful game.

I guarantee, no one at RTW thought this game was awesome and blindly ignored their community.